Chapter 4 Stormy #2
We spend the day battening down the bar.
Tex has a system. He's done this before and it shows.
We move a few perishables from the kitchen up to the apartment in coolers packed with ice.
We tape the windows we can't board. We drag the patio furniture inside and stack it against the far wall. We sandbag the ground-floor doors.
He talks the entire time. He tells me which walls are load-bearing and which ones flex.
He shows me where the generator is and how to start it if we need it, and he makes me repeat the steps back to him until he's certain I've got it.
I don't mind. It feels less like a test and more like he's making sure I'm not helpless if something happens to him.
Nobody has ever planned for me like that.
By mid-afternoon the sky is a color I've never seen before — green-gray, churning, the clouds moving fast and low like they're being chased. The wind has been building all day in gusts that rattle the plywood over the windows, and Tex keeps checking his phone and frowning at the radar.
He doesn't tell me what he sees, but I can read his face well enough. It's bad.
The power goes out a little after sunset.
One second the lights are humming and the neon signs are glowing and the refrigerator is running. The next second, everything goes dark and silent and the only sound in the world is the wind.
It's disorienting. The bar feels different in the dark, bigger and emptier, and full of shapes that weren't there before. Tex finds flashlights within thirty seconds, which tells me he had them positioned where he could grab them blind. He hands me one without our fingers touching.
"And there goes the grid," he says. "That's going to be out for a while. Days, probably. Maybe weeks. Good thing we moved some food up. Gas stove still works so we can cook. We've got water. We've got flashlights and batteries and candles. We're in good shape."
He finds a battery-powered lantern and sets it on the bar, and the warm yellow light turns the room almost cozy. If you ignore the sound of the building being slowly hammered by 100-mile-per-hour winds.
I'm not prepared for the sound of the wind.
It doesn't gust and pause and gust again.
It's constant, a sustained roar that vibrates through the concrete walls and up through the floor into my feet and my legs and my chest. It sounds alive.
It sounds personal, like something enormous and furious is leaning against the building and pushing with everything it has.
I'm standing near the interior wall of the bar, as far from the boarded windows as I can get. My hand is in my pocket on the knife. Not because the knife will help. Because it's the only thing I know how to hold when I'm scared.
And right now, I'm scared.
"Hey," Tex says. He's across the room, checking the tape on the windows with a flashlight. "You doing okay?"
"Fine."
"You're standing against that wall like you're trying to merge with it. I've seen cats in thunderstorms do that. They press their whole body against the wall."
"I'm fine."
"I know you're fine. You're the toughest cat I've got." He comes back to the lantern and starts pulling food from the cooler. "Let me make us a bite to eat. The gas still works and I've got bread and deli meat and about four different kinds of cheese because I'm a man of sophistication."
He makes sandwiches by lantern light, narrating the process like he's hosting a cooking show for an audience of one.
"Now, the key to a good hurricane sandwich," he says, layering turkey and Swiss cheese on sourdough, "is that it has to be a sandwich you can eat with one hand.
Because the other hand is holding a flashlight.
Or bracing yourself against a wall. Or, in one memorable case during Michael, holding onto a dog that washed in through an open window. "
I look at him. "A dog came in during a hurricane?"
"Swear on my daddy's grave. Little old terrier mix, came right through the first-floor window when the plywood ripped off.
Swam over to the pool table, shook himself off, and looked at me like it was my fault.
I named him Hurricane and he lived here for three years until he passed away in his sleep on that same pool table. Best bar dog I ever had."
I don't know if this is true. I don't know if anything he tells me is true.
But the way he says it, with that big, easy voice and those warm brown eyes catching the lantern light, it makes me want it to be true.
It makes me want to live in a world where dogs blow through windows and live happy lives on pool tables.
I eat my sandwich while the wind screams and Tex talks.
Around eight o'clock, the building starts to shake in a way it hasn't before. Not the vibration of the wind, which has been constant for hours. This is different. A deeper movement, a shudder that runs through the foundation, and I feel it in my spine before I understand what it is.
"That's the surge starting to come in," Tex says. He's already moving toward the stairs. "I'm going to check the water level from the balcony. Stay here."
He goes up to the second floor and I hear the door to the exterior balcony open, hear the wind come roaring in like a freight train. I should stay where he told me to stay. That's what I do. I stay where I'm told. I don't make trouble and I don't ask questions.
I follow him upstairs anyway because he also said to stick with him.
The second-floor balcony faces the Gulf, or where the water used to end and the beach used to begin. That distinction doesn't exist anymore. Through the open door, in the beam of Tex's flashlight and the sickly gray glow of the storm, I can see water where there shouldn't be water.
The beach is gone. There is no beach.
There's just water, black and churning, moving inland with a patience that's more terrifying than speed. It's up to the base of the building. I can hear it hitting the first-floor walls, a constant, wet slap that sounds like a monster trying to get in.
Tex is on the balcony. In the wind. In the rain. He's got one hand on the railing and his flashlight in the other and he's leaning out to look down at the waterline.
"The first floor's taking water!" he shouts back at me. "Maybe two feet inside, based on where it's hitting the exterior. Surge is still rising!"
The wind is incredible. I'm standing in the doorway and it's pulling at me, trying to drag me out, and Tex is standing in the full force of it like he's planted there.
His shirt is soaked in seconds, plastered against his chest, and the rain is hitting him hard.
His dark hair is whipping across his face, his beard is dripping and he's squinting against the wind.
And then he laughs.
It starts low in his chest and builds until it's louder than the wind, this full-body, head-thrown-back laugh that comes from somewhere deeper than humor. He grabs the railing with both hands and leans into the storm and yells.
"That all you got, Peter? That's your big move? My grandma hits harder than you and she's been dead for twelve years!"
The wind tears the words out of his mouth and flings them sideways into the dark. He doesn't care. He's grinning, this wild, unhinged grin, rain streaming down his face. He looks like something that was born in a storm and is finally back where it belongs.
"Come on, you son of a bitch!" He slaps the railing with his open palm. "I've got a bar to run! You think I'm scared of you? I survived Michael! I survived a tax audit! You're nothing, Peter! Nothing! You hear me! We'll still be here when you're long gone!"
He turns to me standing in the doorway. His brown eyes are bright and alive and the crinkles at the corners are so deep they look carved. Even in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane with the ocean swallowing his building, he looks like the safest thing in the world.
"You want a turn?" he shouts over the wind. "It's very therapeutic! It doesn't help but it feels fantastic! I also take requests! You want me to yell anything specific?"
I shake my head. I can't speak. Not because of the wind. Because something is happening inside me. It started when he laughed, and hasn't stopped.
I've spent my whole life around men who are big and loud and take up space. Every single one of them used that size and that volume to make the world smaller for someone else. To push. To corner. To trap. Being big was a weapon. Being loud was a warning.
This man is standing in a hurricane, screaming profanity at the sky, and he's not trying to scare anything. He's not trying to dominate anything.
He's just alive.
He's so alive it's pouring out of him like the rain. He's inviting me to yell with him, like joy is a thing that multiplies when you split it instead of shrinking.
I don't join him. I can't. But I stand in the doorway and watch him. I let the image burn into my brain the way a photograph burns onto film.
Tex on the balcony in the hurricane, laughing at the storm.
I think I'll remember this for the rest of my life, no matter how long or short that turns out to be.
He comes back inside dripping wet and shuts the balcony door against the wind.
"Surge is still rising," he says, all business again, like he wasn't just challenging a hurricane to a fistfight.
"We need to move anything left on the first floor up here.
If it gets above four or five feet inside, the bar equipment is going to take a hit. Let's try to save what we can."
We get to work. The next two hours are a blur of stairs and heavy lifting and flashlight beams cutting through the dark.
We carry cases of liquor, the cash register, boxes of records and receipts, anything we can move.
The water is visible now on the first floor, black and cold, creeping across the hardwood floor that Tex's dad built, and I can see Tex watching it with a tightness in his jaw that he doesn't let reach his voice.